In the oil and gas industry, there is often a requirement during reservoir simulation studies to look at the impact of certain parameters on the simulation performance and results. These parameters are studied through the submission of multiple jobs, which often require manual data manipulation by the engineer or the use of iterative ‘decision management’ environments. Iterative ‘decision management’ environments require the model be run from the beginning or from predefined ‘restart’ points created by previous runs. Decision management environments may be used, for example, to modify: (i) solver parameters; (ii) injection/production constraints; (iii) well configuration; (iv) well management; (v) network configuration; (vi) different start times for certain threads, and; (vii) completion sequences.
The current generation of reservoir simulators do not have the ability to simultaneously evaluate different alternative simulation scenarios during a simulation and then choose a scenario as the optimum path (best result) on which to continue. Each scenario represents a thread that is designated as a path the simulation could possibly take. Because of the inability to consider different threads, the user must either define all possible threads upfront and use special ‘decision management’ applications to manage this type of problem externally, or resort to the manual process of submitting multiple runs with manual data changes.
Therefore, there is a need to simultaneously evaluate different alternative simulation threads during a simulation run and select the best thread to continue the simulation run.